The good news, for reasons aired here yesterday, is that gold looks like it’s staging to blow past $600 and run up to at least $625 over the near term. The bad news is that it could pull crude oil quotes along with it. I proffer the chart below as evidence that this scenario may be about to occur. Although most technicians would regard Monday’s high at 67.90 as a double top of sorts, the fact that it exceeded early February’s peak at 67.89 by a single penny has bullish implications from a hidden-pivot perspective.

Had the recent thrust gone no higher than 67.89, we would have gone along with conventional thinking, classifying the uptrend of the last two weeks as a failed rally and therefore part of a topping process. But the one-penny overshoot has left us with a bullish bias for the near to intermediate term, since it turned the A-B segment into an impulse leg that by definition is apt to produce yet another once the current correction has run its course. With pump prices already pushing $2.50 for a gallon of regular, this would be more bad news for the economy. It would also help to explain why the Dow Industrial have been having such trouble surpassing the 10350 trigger price, a feat whose very bullish implications for the stock market I discussed here a while back.